The Other Side of the Sky Read online

  The assistant pilot gave a rather sickly grin. He had never quite lived down a blind date on Mars which had given him a completely unwarranted reputation for preferring statesque blondes.

  There was no sense of motion, but the Centaurus was now falling up into the summer sky as her weight was not only neutralised but reversed. To the watchers below, she would be a swiftly mounting star, a silver globule climbing through and beyond the clouds. Around her, the blue of the atmosphere was deepening into the eternal darkness of space. Like a bead moving along an invisible wire, the freighter was following the pattern of radio waves that would lead her from world to world.

  This, thought Captain Saunders, was his twenty-sixth take-off from Earth. But the wonder would never die, nor would he ever outgrow the feeling of power it gave him to sit here at the control panel, the master of forces beyond even the dreams of mankind’s ancient gods. No two departures were ever the same: some were into the dawn, some toward the sunset, some above a cloud-veiled Earth, some through clear and sparkling skies. Space itself might be unchanging, but on Earth the same pattern never recurred, and no man ever looked twice at the same landscape or the same sky. Down there the Atlantic waves were marching eternally toward Europe, and high above them – but so far below the Centaurus! – the glittering bands of cloud were advancing before the same winds. England began to merge into the continent, and the European coast line became foreshortened and misty as it sank hull down beyond the curve of the world. At the frontier of the west, a fugitive stain on the horizon was the first hint of America. With a single glance, Captain Saunders could span all the leagues across which Columbus had laboured half a thousand years ago.

  With the silence of limitless power, the ship shook itself free from the last bonds of Earth. To an outside observer, the only sign of the energies it was expending would have been the dull red glow from the radiation fins around the vessel’s equator, as the heat loss from the mass-converters was dissipated into space.

  ‘14:03:45,’ wrote Captain Saunders neatly in the log. ‘Escape velocity attained. Course deviation negligible.’

  There was little point in making the entry. The modest 25,000 miles an hour that had been the almost unattainable goal of the first astronauts had no practical significance now, since the Centaurus was still accelerating and would continue to gain speed for hours. But it had a profound psychological meaning. Until this moment, if power had failed, they would have fallen back to Earth. But now gravity could never recapture them: they had achieved the freedom of space, and could take their pick of the planets. In practice, of course, there would be several kinds of hell to pay if they did not pick Mars and deliver their cargo according to plan. But Captain Saunders, like all spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the sombre Neptunian wastes, lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.

  An hour after take-off, according to the hallowed ritual, Chambers left the course computer to its own devices and produced the three glasses that lived beneath the chart table. As he drank the traditional toast to Newton, Oberth, and Einstein, Saunders wondered how this little ceremony had originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for at least sixty years: perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engineer who made the remark, ‘I’ve burned more alcohol in sixty seconds than you’ve ever sold across this lousy bar.’

  Two hours later, the last course correction that the tracking stations on Earth could give them had been fed into the computer. From now on, until Mars came sweeping up ahead, they were on their own. It was a lonely thought, yet a curiously exhilarating one. Saunders savoured it in his mind. There were just the three of them here – and no one else within a million miles.

  In the circumstances, the detonation of an atomic bomb could hardly have been more shattering than the modest knock on the cabin door….

  Captain Saunders had never been so startled in his life. With a yelp that had already left him before he had a chance to suppress it, he shot out of his seat and rose a full yard before the ship’s residual gravity field dragged him back. Chambers and Mitchell, on the other hand, behaved with traditional British phlegm. They swivelled in their bucket seats, stared at the door, and then waited for their captain to take action.

  It took Saunders several seconds to recover. Had he been confronted with what might be called a normal emergency, he would already have been halfway into a space suit. But a diffident knock on the door of the control cabin, when everybody else in the ship was sitting beside him, was not a fair test.

  A stowaway was simply impossible. The danger had been so obvious, right from the beginning of commercial space flight, that the most stringent precautions had been taken against it. One of his officers, Saunders knew, would always have been on duty during loading; no one could possibly have crept in unobserved. Then there had been the detailed preflight inspection, carried out by both Mitchell and Chambers. Finally, there was the weight check at the moment before take-off; that was conclusive. No, a stowaway was totally …

  The knock on the door sounded again. Captain Saunders clenched his fists and squared his jaw. In a few minutes, he thought, some romantic idiot was going to be very, very sorry.

  ‘Open the door, Mr Mitchell,’ Saunders growled. In a single long stride, the assistant pilot crossed the cabin and jerked open the hatch.

  For an age, it seemed, no one spoke. Then the stowaway, wavering slightly in the low gravity, came into the cabin. He was completely self-possessed, and looked very pleased with himself.

  ‘Good afternoon, Captain Saunders,’ he said, ‘I must apologise for this sudden intrusion.’

  Saunders swallowed hard. Then, as the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, he looked first at Mitchell, then at Chambers. Both of his officers stared guilelessly back at him with expressions of ineffable innocence. ‘So that’s it,’ he said bitterly. There was no need for any explanations: everything was perfectly clear. It was easy to picture the complicated negotiations, the midnight meetings, the falsification of records, the off-loading of nonessential cargoes that his trusted colleagues had been conducting behind his back. He was sure it was a most interesting story, but he didn’t want to hear about it now. He was too busy wondering what the Manual of Space Law would have to say about a situation like this, though he was already gloomily certain that it would be of no use to him at all.

  It was too late to turn back, of course: the conspirators wouldn’t have made an elementary miscalculation like that. He would just have to make the best of what looked to be the trickiest voyage in his career.

  He was still trying to think of something to say when the PRIORITY signal started flashing on the radio board. The stowaway looked at his watch.

  ‘I was expecting that,’ he said. ‘It’s probably the Prime Minister. I think I’d better speak to the poor man.’

  Saunders thought so too.

  ‘Very well, Your Royal Highness,’ he said sulkily, and with such emphasis that the title sounded almost like an insult. Then, feeling much put upon, he retired into a corner.

  It was the Prime Minister all right, and he sounded very upset. Several times he used the phrase ‘your duty to your people’ and once there was a distinct catch in his throat as he said something about ‘devotion of your subjects to the Crown’. Saunders realised, with some surprise, that he really meant it.

  While this emotional harangue was in progress, Mitchell leaned over to Saunders and whispered in his ear:

  ‘The old boy’s on a sticky wicket, and he knows it. The people will be behind the prince when they hear what’s happened. Everybody knows he’s been trying to get into space for years.’

  ‘I wish he hadn’t chosen my ship,’ said Saunders. ‘And I’m not sure that this doesn’t count as mutiny.’

  ‘The heck it does. Mark my words – when this is all over you’ll be the only Texan to have the Order of the Garter. Won’t that be nice for you?’

 
‘Shush!’ said Chambers. The prince was speaking, his words winging back across the abyss that now sundered him from the island he would one day rule.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘if I’ve caused you any alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient. Someone has to do everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come for a member of my family to leave Earth. It will be a valuable part of my education, and will make me more fitted to carry out my duty. Goodbye.’

  He dropped the microphone and walked over to the observation window – the only spaceward-looking port on the entire ship. Saunders watched him standing there, proud and lonely – but contented now. And as he saw the prince staring out at the stars which he had at last attained, all his annoyance and indignation slowly evaporated.

  No one spoke for a long time. Then Prince Henry tore his gaze away from the blinding splendour beyond the port, looked at Captain Saunders, and smiled.

  ‘Where’s the galley, Captain?’ he asked. ‘I may be out of practice, but when I used to go scouting I was the best cook in my patrol.’

  Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled back. The tension seemed to lift from the control room. Mars was still a long way off, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to be such a bad trip after all….

  The Other Side of the Sky

  First published in Infinity Science Fiction Magazine, September/October 1957Collected in The Other Side of the SkyThe success of the earlier set of linked short stories, ‘Venture to the Moon’, led to the writing of this series which by good luck appeared on the London newsstands just when Sputnik I appeared in the sky. Special Delivery

  I can still remember the excitement, back in 1957, when Russia launched the first artificial satellites and managed to hang a few pounds of instruments up here above the atmosphere. Of course, I was only a kid at the time, but I went out in the evening like everyone else, trying to spot those little magnesium spheres as they zipped through the twilight sky hundreds of miles above my head. It’s strange to think that some of them are still there – but that now they’re below me, and I’d have to look down toward Earth if I wanted to see them …

  Yes, a lot has happened in the last forty years, and sometimes I’m afraid that you people down on Earth take the space stations for granted, forgetting the skill and science and courage that went to make them. How often do you stop to think that all your long-distance phone calls, and most of your TV programmes, are routed through one or the other of the satellites? And how often do you give any credit to the meteorologists up here for the fact that weather forecasts are no longer the joke they were to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate ninety-nine per cent of the time?

  It was a rugged life, back in the seventies, when I went up to work on the outer stations. They were being rushed into operation to open up the millions of new TV and radio circuits which would be available as soon as we had transmitters out in space that could beam programmes to anywhere on the globe.

  The first artificial satellites had been very close to Earth, but the three stations forming the great triangle of the Relay Chain had to be twenty-two thousand miles up, spaced equally around the equator. At this altitude – and at no other – they would take exactly a day to go around their orbit, and so would stay poised forever over the same spot on the turning Earth.

  In my time I’ve worked on all three of the stations, but my first tour of duty was aboard Relay Two. That’s almost exactly over Entebbe, Uganda, and provides service for Europe, Africa, and most of Asia. Today it’s a huge structure hundreds of yards across, beaming thousands of simultaneous programmes down to the hemisphere beneath it as it carries the radio traffic of half the world. But when I saw it for the first time from the port of the ferry rocket that carried me up to orbit, it looked like a junk pile adrift in space. Prefabricated parts were floating around in hopeless confusion, and it seemed impossible that any order could ever emerge from this chaos.

  Accommodation for the technical staff and assembling crews was primitive, consisting of a few unserviceable ferry rockets that had been stripped of everything except air purifiers. ‘The Hulks’, we christened them; each man had just enough room for himself and a couple of cubic feet of personal belongings. There was a fine irony in the fact that we were living in the midst of infinite space – and hadn’t room to swing a cat.

  It was a great day when we heard that the first pressurised living quarters were on their way up to us – complete with needle-jet shower baths that would operate even here, where water – like everything else – had no weight. Unless you’ve lived aboard an overcrowded spaceship, you won’t appreciate what that meant. We could throw away our damp sponges and feel really clean at last …

  Nor were the showers the only luxury promised us. On the way up from Earth was an inflatable lounge spacious enough to hold no fewer than eight people, a microfilm library, a magnetic billiard table, lightweight chess sets, and similar novelties for bored spacemen. The very thought of all these comforts made our cramped life in the Hulks seem quite unendurable, even though we were being paid about a thousand dollars a week to endure it.

  Starting from the Second Refuelling Zone, two thousand miles above Earth, the eagerly awaited ferry rocket would take about six hours to climb up to us with its precious cargo. I was off duty at the time, and stationed myself at the telescope where I’d spent most of my scanty leisure. It was impossible to grow tired of exploring the great world hanging there in space beside us; with the highest power of the telescope, one seemed to be only a few miles above the surface. When there were no clouds and the seeing was good, objects the size of a small house were easily visible. I had never been to Africa, but I grew to know it well while I was off duty in Station Two. You may not believe this, but I’ve often spotted elephants moving across the plains, and the immense herds of zebras and antelopes were easy to see as they flowed back and forth like living tides on the great reservations.

  But my favourite spectacle was the dawn coming up over the mountains in the heart of the continent. The line of sunlight would come sweeping across the Indian Ocean, and the new day would extinguish the tiny twinkling galaxies of the cities shining in the darkness below me. Long before the sun had reached the lowlands around them, the peaks of Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya would be blazing in the dawn, brilliant stars still surrounded by the night. As the sun rose higher, the day would march swiftly down their slopes and the valleys would fill with light. Earth would then be at its first quarter, waxing toward full.

  Twelve hours later, I would see the reverse process as the same mountains caught the last rays of the setting sun. They would blaze for a little while in the narrow belt of twilight; then Earth would spin into darkness, and night would fall upon Africa.

  It was not the beauty of the terrestrial globe I was concerned with now. Indeed, I was not even looking at Earth, but at the fierce blue-white star high above the western edge of the planet’s disc. The automatic freighter was eclipsed in Earth’s shadow; what I was seeing was the incandescent flare of its rockets as they drove it up on its twenty-thousand-mile climb.

  I had watched ships ascending to us so often that I knew every stage of their manoeuvre by heart. So when the rockets didn’t wink out, but continued to burn steadily, I knew within seconds that something was wrong. In sick, helpless fury I watched all our longed-for comforts – and, worse still, our mail! – moving faster and faster along the unintended orbit. The freighter’s auto-pilot had jammed; had there been a human pilot aboard, he could have overridden the controls and cut the motor, but now all the fuel that should have driven the ferry on its two-way trip was being burned in one continuous blast of power.

  By the time the fuel tanks had emptied, and that distant star had flickered and died in the field of my telescope, the tracking stations had confirmed what I already knew. The freighter was moving far too fast for Earth’s gravity to recapture it – indeed, it was heading into the cosmic wilderness beyond Pluto …

  It took
a long time for morale to recover, and it only made matters worse when someone in the computing section worked out the future history of our errant freighter. You see, nothing is ever really lost in space. Once you’ve calculated its orbit, you know where it is until the end of eternity. As we watched our lounge, our library, our games, our mail receding to the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it would all come back one day, in perfect condition. If we have a ship standing by it will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes around the sun – quite early in the spring of the year AD 15,862.

  Feathered Friend

  To the best of my knowledge, there’s never been a regulation that forbids one to keep pets in a space station. No one ever thought it was necessary – and even had such a rule existed, I am quite certain that Sven Olsen would have ignored it.

  With a name like that, you will picture Sven at once as a six-foot-six Nordic giant, built like a bull and with a voice to match. Had this been so, his chances of getting a job in space would have been very slim; actually he was a wiry little fellow, like most of the early spacers, and managed to qualify easily for the 150-pound bonus that kept so many of us on a reducing diet.